British icon band EDITORS with a very special personality in the international music scene joins the floor with the incredible & legendary THE CURE – newly introduced in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – on July 22nd at Piata Constitutiei in Bucharest. On the same evening, as opening act will perform FIRMA alongside the Irish band GOD IS AN ASTRONAUT.
Tickets for the festival can be bought via eventim.ro!
Editors have consistently enjoyed sold-out tours and numerous headlining festival slots. Their brand of dark indie rock is commonly compared to the sound of bands such as Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division, Interpol, The Chameleons and U2. Their music was featured throughout the Twilight saga movies.
Editors are an English rock band, formed in 2002 in Birmingham. Previously known as Pilot, The Pride and Snowfield, the band currently consists of Tom Smith (lead vocals, guitar, piano), Russell Leetch (bass guitar, synthesiser, backing vocals), Ed Lay (drums, percussion, backing vocals), Justin Lockey (lead guitar), and Elliott Williams (keys, synthesisers, guitars, and backing vocals). Editors have so far released two platinum studio albums, and six in total, with several million combined sales. Their debut album The Back Room was released in 2005. It contained the hits “Munich” and “Blood” and the following year received a Mercury Prize nomination.
In 2018, the band released their sixth album Violence. When describing Editors’ sixth album, Tom Smith keeps journeying back to the same word: “brutal”. It’s an apt descriptor for Violence, both in the record’s aggressive title and its all-enveloping, assertive sound. But on this follow-up to 2015’s stunning, top 5-charting In Dream, brutality doesn’t just exist as a one dimensional, juggernaut-like force. Violence isn’t brutal for the sake of it, and it’s rarely the enforcer. Instead, it acts as a haven, a protective shell against the often relentless brutality of the outside world. In 2018, almost everyone is seeking some kind of escape – from ultra-consumerist culture, from tyrannical power-holders, from the endless swarm of grim headlines popping up as anxiety-inducing notifications. When Editors first started writing Violence towards the end of summer 2016, they didn’t intend to reflect today’s troubled times or create some kind of sanctuary from the world outside. Nor do the band view this album as some direct antidote to current events. This isn’t an overtly political record and it shouldn’t be perceived as such. But art has a habit of reflecting its environment. Months after finishing the record, Smith finally sees it in a new light: “A lot of the songs are in a room,” he starts. “Outside of this room exists scary things, modern worries – the world we live in, essentially. But in this room, there’s a connection between two people. Whether that’s a direct relationship or if it’s friendship, there’s an escape. That connection is important because of the fear of what’s going on outside.” It’s hard to view this narrative outside of today’s context. Smith says he’s just like you and me – he often switches off the news when it gets overbearing. Not from a position of ignorance, but from a need to protect his own sanity, so that he can “focus on friends, children, things that are important to me.”
Violence is also Smith’s strongest record as a lyricist. “I’ve always wanted the words to resonate on an emotional level, to be able to penetrate that way. That’s what a lot of our fans like about what we do. Equally, that’s what people who don’t like the band hate about us,” he smiles. “I very rarely sit down to tell a story.” As a writer, he doesn’t tend to follow a grand conceptual arc. “I go on gut instinct, and I follow a certain thread of an idea,” he concluded.
FiRMA was emerging the Romanian musical scene in 2001, setting up the first features of the alternative rock, a new genre that changed the perception on rock music at a national level. By launching their debut album `La Orbire` in 2003, FiRMA definitely inforced its position as a trendsetter of the local alternative-rock sound, catching the attention of the musical press & critics. Produced by the band`s lead singer Daniel `Rocca` Stoicea, `La Orbire` was a successful studio material that combined the rough quitar riffs of alternative rock with warm funk, blues, cinematic and trip-hop sonorities. The subtile poetic lyricism was and it is still another one of the characteristics that made FiRMA stand out and become an icon of the Romanian music.